Collaborative Research: ARTS: Identifying diversity, describing species, and revising taxonomy of New Guinean snakes

新几内亚岛位于澳大利亚北部，是一个生物多样性热点，但也是世界上研究最少的地区之一。与此同时，新几内亚的森林砍伐率很高；从1972-2002年，该岛东半部24%的森林因伐木而被砍伐或退化。这意味着有许多我们知之甚少的受威胁生物。尽管蛇不像极乐鸟等动物那样受人类欢迎，但蛇对该岛的生态很重要，许多蛇是顶级捕食者，对生态系统有很大影响。蛇也给人类带来了鲜为人知但重要的好处，比如用毒液制成的药物。尽管蛇在该岛的生态系统中很重要，但大多数新几内亚物种的研究仍然很少，可能还有许多物种尚未被描述。这个项目关注的是新几内亚研究最少的两类蛇--土蛇和基脊蛇。该项目的科学工作包括到新几内亚探险，以发现这些蛇，收集遗传和形态数据，并利用这些信息识别新物种，确定这些物种之间的关系，并将这些物种置于更广泛的蛇关系背景下，最终为评估新几内亚的生物多样性做出新的贡献。这项工作还为进行这项研究的资深科学家以及来自美国和新几内亚的本科生和研究生提供了新的科学培训。由此产生的出版物将是开放获取的，在这项工作资助的本科生的帮助下，将为每个发现的新物种创建在线维基页面；因此，科学家、教育工作者和全球公众都可以访问所有结果。资深科学家还将利用他们相关的博物馆和大学平台公开展示从儿童到成人的所有教育级别的研究成果。科学和教育的这种交织将培养有效的科学家，为公众知识做出贡献，并促进国际关系。新几内亚蛇的阿尔法分类鲜为人知，多条证据表明存在大量未描述的多样性(目前仅有约75%的物种被确认)。此外，来自焦点属的物种很少或没有被包括在已发表的分子系统发育中，因此在现代系统研究中基本上是未知的。该项目有四个基本目标：(1)在巴布亚新几内亚以及印度尼西亚和菲律宾开展实地工作，以补充目前对地面蛇(Stegonotus)和脊椎蛇(Tropidonopits)的采样，用于高通量DNA测序工作(靶标捕获)和当代形态数据收集，方法是生成高分辨率CT扫描，包括用可扩散碘染色的对比度增强扫描。(2)当无法获得新鲜组织时，使用博物馆标本来填补采样空白，使用最近公布的液体保存标本测序方案。(3)结合分子和形态数据，在一本修正性专著中描述新种和来自焦点属的属内关系。(4)培养下一代分类学家，同时为主要研究人员以及美国和巴布亚新几内亚的本科生和研究生扩展工具包。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Located just north of Australia, the island of New Guinea is a biodiversity hotspot but one of the least studied regions of the world. Simultaneously, New Guinea suffers from high rates of deforestation; from 1972 - 2002, 24% of the eastern half of the island's forests were cleared or degraded through logging. This means that there are many threatened organisms that we know little about. Although not as popular with humans as animals like birds of paradise, snakes are important to the ecology of the island, with many snakes being top predators that have large impacts on the ecosystem. Snakes also provide lesser known but important benefits to humans, such as medical drugs made from venoms. Despite the importance of snakes in the island ecosystem, the majority of New Guinean species remain poorly studied and there are likely many species not yet described. This project focuses on two of the most poorly studied groups of snakes in New Guinea, the groundsnakes and the keelbacks. Scientific efforts for this project include expeditions to New Guinea to find these snakes, gather genetic and morphological data, and use this information to identify new species, determine how the species are related to each other, and place these species in the broader context of snake relationships, ultimately resulting in novel contributions to the assessment of New Guinean biodiversity. This work also provides new scientific training to the senior scientists conducting the study and to undergraduates and graduate students from both the United States and New Guinea. Resulting publications will be open-access and online wiki pages will be created for each new species discovered with the help of undergraduate students funded by this work; all results can thus be accessed by scientists, educators, and the global public alike. The senior scientists will also use both their associated museum and university platforms to publicly present results at all educational levels, from children to adults. This interweaving of science and education will train effective scientists, contribute to public knowledge, and foster international relations. The alpha taxonomy of New Guinean snakes is poorly known and multiple lines of evidence suggest substantial undescribed diversity (only ca. 75% of species are currently recognized). Furthermore, few or none of the species from the focal genera have been included in published molecular phylogenies and thus are essentially unknowns in modern systematic studies. This project has four fundamental objectives: (1) Conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, as well as in Indonesia and the Philippines, to complement current sampling for groundsnakes (Stegonotus) and keelbacks (Tropidonophis) for use in high-throughput DNA sequencing efforts (target capture) and contemporary morphological data collection by generating high-resolution CT scans and including contrast-enhanced scans stained with diffusible iodine. (2) Use museum specimens to fill in sampling gaps when fresh tissues are unobtainable using a recently published protocol for sequencing of fluid-preserved specimens. (3) Describe new species and the intrageneric relationships from the focal genera in a revisionary monograph based on a combination of molecular and morphological data. (4) Train the next generation of taxonomists and simultaneously expand the tool kit for both the principal investigators and for U.S. and Papua New Guinea undergraduate and graduate students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.